Today's Top Alzheimer's News

February 24, 2014

David Satcher calls on African Americans to participate in clinical trials, struggling with early onset Alzheimer's, and Alzheimer's and art (read more).

Must reads and watch

A February 23, 2014 Sacramento Bee article profiled a family's struggle with early onset Alzheimer's. According to the article, "Tracy Broshar knew that something was amiss by the fall of 2012. Her longtime partner, Jennifer Small, was only 49 then, but increasingly she was losing track of the details she used to be so good at handling...By the spring of 2013, a positron emission tomography scan of her brain verified the diagnosis: She has younger onset Alzheimer’s disease, which affects more than 250,000 Americans in their prime, before they reach age 65."

A February 21, 2014 Washington Post opinion piece by David Satcher called for African Americans to increase their participation in clinical trials. According to Satcher, "For years, studies have found that African Americans have a profound mistrust of doctors and scientists. Consequently, we participate in clinical trials at far lower rates than other ethnic groups, which helps to perpetuate the sort of disparities seen with diseases such as Alzheimer’s…As one of the groups that has the most to gain from Alzheimer’s clinical trials, African Americans should lead by example. In doing so, we just might gain meaningful insight into the causes of the disparate impact of Alzheimer’s and help speed our pace to a cure." David Satcher is honorary chairman of the African American Network Against Alzheimer’s and a former surgeon general of the United States.

Why 2020?

USAgainstAlzheimer’s has retained its goal of stopping Alzheimer’s by 2020 rather than endorsing the goal of the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease that calls for preventing and effectively treating the disease by 2025. While we support the national plan and its goals, we believe, as most every family touched by Alzheimer’s disease believes, that preventing and effectively treating Alzheimer's by 2025 is simply too long a wait for concrete progress. There are promising avenues of drug discovery and development that will, if successful, deliver a means of slowing or deferring Alzheimer's symptoms by 2020. By voicing the urgency felt by so many families, we will pressure researchers and industry to do all in their power to make that happen.